Maybe you’ve heard about it, but you haven’t encountered it yet. Or have you? Some say it’s a myth, others say they can’t possibly be affected. Should you be worried about it? I’m talking about Negative SEO.
Negative Search Engine Optimization is a practice or attempt by competitors against your site to kick you off the rankings using tactics and techniques that are unethical and malicious. Since the competition is tough in this field, competitors have lots of strategies in their pockets to lower your ranking.
So what happens when Negative SEO takes action? It comes in different forms and the effects range from minimal damage to devastating ones. But the truth of the matter is, you can work around it. You can do something to prevent it from happening and protect yourself from these black hat techniques.
Here are some tactics used in Negative SEO and how you can intentionally protect your site from getting affected:
1. HACKING
Detecting the hacking can be a difficult thing and it’s pretty vicious. Never take this lightly because this is an actual threat. When an external party exploits the weakness of a website for a particular gain and purpose, site manipulation comes easy. At this point, your keyword rankings are in danger.
How to protect your site:
Regular Site Audits
Perform regular audits on your site and keep watch for non-targeted keywords. It’s undeniable that algorithms are being updated by search engines to cater to better results. That’s the reason why you need to run on the latest updates to make sure you’re still steady in your rankings.
Strengthen and Secure Your Password
Your site was probably compromised because your password wasn’t strong enough. You need to avoid using weak passwords. It follows, of course, that the more secure and strong your password is, the harder it will be for hackers to hack your site and exploit it. Along with this, you can use multifactor authentication. This doubles up your security in case a hacker attempts to hack in. It asks for information that’s unique to the user. You must maintain a strong password to provide integrity and protection for your website.
Schedule for Site Updates
This is something you don’t want to ignore. Please update your site. You don’t know when these hackers are going to attack and explore existing navigations. Your site must be on the most up-to-date software with the latest security features.
2. LINK SPAMMING
So what happens when there’s link spamming? More than this being a frustrating thing and can cause damage, this is quite annoying to deal with. Regardless of search context, link spamming is the threat created by attackers by placing backlinks on sites and pages to increase search rankings. These links could be those low-quality links from certain web directories, illegal or explicit links, broken links, hidden links and the like.
This elevates the site’s search engine result page or its SERP. An increase in SERP means an increase in website traffic that’s why spammers or attackers would go this route.
How to protect your site:
Backlink Audit
Regularly perform an audit on your backlinks. This way, you can detect all those spammy links and you can identify which domains are illegal and toxic. You can also go ahead and disavow them with the use of tools.
Auditing regularly can help you identify spammy anchor texts. You can sift through these anchor texts and pick out the irrelevant anchors.
You can read a full guide on how to disavow bad backlinks.
You can submit your disavow file here.
Related Post: Google: How Long it Takes for Disavow File to Affect Rankings
Consider to Invest in SEO tools
If you’re willing, intentional and serious about maintaining your site’s health and security, then go ahead and invest in a good SEO tool. Apart from getting your site regularly audited through the tool, it can help you create relevant content and build your presence on search engines.
Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Clickflow, Pagespeed Insights, MozBar, are some of the SEO tools that can help enhance, maintain, and develop your site to its maximum potential in the world wide web.
3. FAKE REVIEWS ( AND FAKE PROFILES)
We all know that reviews are important not just for online merchants, but also for end-users and consumers. Fake profiles and reviews can be difficult to identify; you’ve probably read one but did not recognize its legitimacy. These fakes exist on different platforms across the web and undoubtedly sow distrust between consumers and merchants. And for attackers, these are the least difficult to manipulate.
If consumers suspect that they’re reading fake reviews, let alone fake reviews from fake profiles, they won’t end up purchasing.
How to protect your site:
First off, you must identify those giveaway signs that these reviews are fake:
- The reviews lean towards generalizations rather than details.
- It has links leading to other sites.
- It has obvious and incorrect information about the product.
- It can be seen on another site. Same comments. Same remarks.
- It makes no sense.
So what to do?
Flag it!
You need to respond to this kind of threat professionally, so flagging these reviews as inappropriate is an upfront response. By doing this, other review sites like Google can easily recognize these threats and can put a halt to their actions. There must be no tolerance towards these kinds of attacks before they make considerable damage.
Get a Verifier System
A verifier system can ensure that the reviews you’re looking at are made by actual responders who made the purchase. Getting a system or plugin that gathers real reviews from shoppers who bought products online. You won’t regret taking this step.
Remove that Spam
The moment you notice spam posted or uploaded on your social media platforms, take the initiative to remove it. At times, it could be difficult to identify which ones are fake but just taking the step to remove spam or reviews having malicious hints will do you more good.
4. CONTENT SCRAPING
This threat is among the most common of all threats. The attacker utilizes this to copy whatever content you have and put it on another website or multiple websites. What happens is that this is being automatically done by bots. Of course, this will then lead to duplicates. And if sites like Google identifies a copy firsthand, it will recognize it as the main and original. Your website’s integrity and reputation will be compromised when this happens.
How to protect your site:
You can use tools to look out for content that’s copied or plagiarized. Tools such as Copyscape or Grammarly can help you search for duplicate content. And once you do find such, reach out to the webmaster of the sites or the pages where you found these duplicates for them to remove the content. At most, you can go ahead and report it to Google and create a notice—a copyright takedown notice.
5. CREATING FAKE PARAMETERS
Let’s consider this a low-blow attack. These attackers would create fake parameters that lead to Uniform Resource Locators on your website. To cause your site to get penalized, irrelevant keywords are created as parameters and eventually affect your site ranking and integrity.
How to protect your site:
You can utilize a canonical URL. It leads search engines to the URL that’s preferred so Google can rank it accordingly. This ensures that there will be no other versions of the Uniform Resource Locator that will be indexed. You may also want to regularly monitor and audit your website and review your Search Engine Optimization strategies.
Takeaway
So, should you be worried about Negative SEO?
As others say, prevention is better than cure. Before the attacks or threat happens, secure your site. This is an ongoing task that you must do to keep the protection up. Make sure that your site is not prone to vulnerabilities and when threats come, you’re ready to address them firmly. It’s true, you may not be completely safe from these kinds of attacks, but you can bulletproof yourself. Don’t overthink it. Just take the necessary actions to get your site protected.
